reth's Despotism in America (1854), 263, _et al._]

Still further, these judges thus appointed become familiar with fraud,
violence, cruelty, selfishness,--refined or brutal,--which comes
before them; they study the technicalities of the statutes, balance
the scruples of advocates; they lose their fresh intuitions of
justice, becoming more and more legal, less and less human, less
natural and more technical; their eye is microscopic in its niceness
of discrimination, microscopic also in its narrowness of range. They
forget the universality of justice,--the End which laws should aim at;
they direct their lynx-eyed attention to the speciality of the
statutes which is only the Means, of no value save as conducing to
that end. Their understanding is sharp as a mole's eye for the minute
distinctions of the technicalities of their craft; but, as
short-sighted as the mole, they cannot look at justice. So they come
to acknowledge no obligation but the legal, and know no law except
what is written in Black Letter on parchment, printed in
statute-books, reported in decisions; the Law written by God on the
soul of man they know not, only the statute and decision bound in pale
sheepskin. In the logic of legal deduction--technical inference--they
forget the intuition of conscience: not What is right? but What is
law? is the question, and they pay the same deference to a wicked
statute as a just one. So the true Mussulman values the absurdities
of the Koran as much as its noblest wisdom and tenderest humanity.

Such a man so appointed, so disciplined, will administer the law
fairly enough in civil cases between party and party, where he has no
special interest to give him a bias--for he cares not whether John Doe
or Richard Roe gain the parcel of ground in litigation before him. But
in criminal cases he leans to severity, not mercy; he suspects the
People; he reverences the government. In political trials he never
forgets the hand that feeds him,--Charles Stuart, George Guelph, or
the Slave Power of America.

These things being so, in such trials you see the exceeding value of
the jury, who are not Office-holders, under obligation to the hand
that feeds them; not Office-seekers, willing to prostitute their
faculties to the service of some overmastering lust; not lawyers
wonted to nice technicalities; not members of a class, with its
special discipline and peculiar prejudices; but men with their moral
instincts normally active, and